


Shuffle the Deck (or, A Helpful Stranger Appears)

by Azzandra



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Alternate Universe, Backstory Swap, Canon typical drug use, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 12:40:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7715251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Backstory Swap AU. In which a female Sole Survivor meets the same people, but in slightly different roles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shuffle the Deck (or, A Helpful Stranger Appears)

**Author's Note:**

> I have been thinking about this, and I might as well write it. I actually wrote a post about companion backstory swap on tumblr, which you can read [here](http://azzandra.tumblr.com/post/142307502871/companion-backstory-swap) if you want spoilers for future chapters.
> 
> I will be using my usual Sole Survivor Phil, but in the spirit of 'swap all the things!' I have also swapped hers and Nate's backstories. For the funsies.
> 
> In regards to shipping, all I have to say is Boy I Sure Hope You Like Genfic.

 First thing first, Phil needed to get her bearings. 

It wasn't an issue of knowing which road went where. Geographically, she had a good handle on things. She had, at the very least, a Pip-boy. She knew the lay of the land, even if her info was somewhat (two centuries) outdated. It was her boots that needed to learn it now. New pair. Had to break them in.

Phil laced up the boots tight, double knot, and gave one last mournful look to the dead drifter she'd stolen her new set of clothes from. She hadn't killed him herself--the vault suit she wore as she emerged from the vault felt too thin and exposed, but she wasn't about to murder someone for a patchy leather coat and a blood-encrusted shirt. The cooling dog corpse next to the drifter was probably responsible for that part. 

Well, fair's fair, so she also robbed the dead dog of the crowbar stuck into its side. She swung it once for practice, testing it weight, and then hooked it onto her pack. Could be useful.

After that, south was as good a direction as any, though the fact that the first human she came across in this blasted landscape was a corpse did not bode well at all.

Torn apart by dogs. Fuck. When she was imagining death after the bombs, this kind of brutal, unexpectedly trite sort of death wasn't what she'd ever pictured, especially not with the dog looking like it had been boiled beforehand.

Anyway. South. Unsure if she should seek out human contact or keep to the wilds, she spent a few days meandering roughly southwards, picking scavenge out of houses that struck her as already thoroughly picked-over long before she got there. She was running on Cram and flat Nuka-Cola when she came across the Abernathy Farm.

And it was, undeniably, a farm. She could discern its basic farm elements even from afar: the patchwork homestead, the fenced-in rows of vegetables, the human figures with their hands in the dirt. And then, also, the man roaming the perimeter with a shotgun on his shoulder. Not shooting for rabbits, if Phil had to guess. Probably for worse things, judging by what Phil had come across in her short time outside the vault.

Phil holstered her own pistol and walked slowly towards the farm, keeping her hands loose and in sight. The man--Blake Abernathy, she'd learn later his name was--tracked her progress with narrowed eyes.

"That's close enough," he said just as Phil came to a halt before him.

There was an edge of apprehension to Blake Abernathy as he spoke to Phil, even though he and his family clearly outnumbered her. Things went a bit more smoothly once Phil managed to relay the fact that she was not a raider, nor had any ill intentions towards them.

Hell, at this point, did she even know what her intentions were?

Maybe Blake saw the lost look in her eyes, or maybe Phil's questions about the state of the Commonwealth clued him in on just how much of a lost puppy she was, because as they talked, he let his guard down a bit. He offered her a cup of fresh, clean water from the pumps, which Phil sampled like the finest of wines after a few days in the Wasteland.

Phil told him about her son, in skittish, vague terms, as much as she could handle putting it into words. She couldn't even say out loud what had happened to Nate, which was strange considering how many people she'd seen die. Or how many people she'd killed herself, during her military career.

Then Blake told her about Mary's locket, and Phil knew exactly where she'd go next. She knew Olivia Station--she'd had an old buddy stationed there back in the day--and it was a direction. A point on the map she could make her way to. Somewhere to go, something to do other than curl up in a ball and die.

She spent the afternoon picking melons for Lucy Abernathy, in exchange for the bottlecaps which were the currency in this brave new world. The sums she was getting felt like a pittance, but if Phil had known back in the day that every Nuka-Cola she drank could add to her future fortunes, she'd have accumulated an impressive stash with how much she drank the stuff.

The next morning, Phil woke up early, but not as early as the Abernathies. She traded for some supplies with Connie Abernathy, and then she was headed off.

Olivia Station. Northwest. As good a direction as any.

 

* * *

 

Northwest took her through Concord. Rows of blasted houses, doors either boarded up or splinters, unsteady staircases and whatever scraps the scavengers had left behind.

Phil was on her belly on the floor, her craned neck aching as she worked on a safe, when she heard the pop of gunfire in the distance. Instinct made her freeze and listen, trying to discern--hell, she wasn't even sure. Time was, you could tell if your guys were the ones doing the shooting just by the pitch of the shot. The world was a lot less clear cut nowadays.

Best case scenario, it was raider gangs having a turf wars; two equally awful sides wiping each other out, the trash practically taking itself out. It would have required nothing of her.

Worse case, it was still raiders, fighting something else. Worst case, it was raiders fighting _someone_ else.

Funny case, it was raiders getting stomped by some sort of mutant Wasteland creature.

Phil gave one last twist of the bobby pin. The safe door clicked open. She stuffed the contents into her bag with little regard--some ammo, some Rad-X, a 10 mil pistol that didn't look any better than the one she was already using. She left behind a thick stack of good old fashioned US dollars that was now less valuable than a rusty tin box filled with rattling soda bottlecaps.

Phil made her way down the stairs, hopped off the porch, and took the nearest street towards the gunfire.

She emerged on the street squinting, staring towards the Museum of Freedom. There were gunshots, and then there were flashes, beams of red light coming from the upper balcony of the Museum. If Phil still had her glasses, she was sure she'd find the entire spectacle edifying. As it was, she still didn't have a damn clue what was happening there, and who was fighting who.

She ducked into a nearby alley for safety, made her way through some rubble and into a store, but for all her effort to sneak quietly along, she came across a nest of those disgusting overgrown roaches. If she used her pistol, the shots would probably be lost in the din from the gunfight outside, but Phil took out the crowbar instead, better safe than sorry, and pummeled the bugs.

She was putting the finishing touches on a particularly harsh bug-squashing, when her foot hit against a nearby bucket. Another, previously hidden roach flew out of the bucket, and Phil honest to goodness shrieked, as any sane individual would when faced with a pest control problem this out of hand.

She pummeled the roach into a fine paste, hitting it until it was long past crushed, and only stopped, panting, when she was sure there was nothing left of it.

Phil was momentarily grateful there were no witnesses to her brief loss of composure, until she straightened up and made direct eye contact with a red-haired woman standing in the doorway with a bemused look on her face.

"Well, aren't you a sprightly one?" she said with a thick Irish brogue, as she looked Phil up and down. "I guess you'll do."

Phil leveled the crowbar defensively, unsure what the woman intended.

"'Do'? Do for what?" Phil asked, hoping the woman didn't mean do for a broth, or anything equally sinister. _Were_ there cannibals in the Wasteland? Probably, Phil concluded. Even before the end times, when society was still considered civil, there were people just itching to see it go to hell so they could cut loose. 

"We'll have a gab over coffee later," the woman said, "but for now, I need help, and you're the nearest person here with a nice strong arm and no psychotic glint in your eye. I'm Cait. Consider yourself drafted."

"Into what army?" Phil asked, incredulous.

Cait pointed to the Museum of Freedom, where the raiders were still having a shoot-out with someone on the upper balcony. 

"The Minutemen. Congratulations, you're a militawoman now."

 

* * *

 

Cait was short on explanations, and the ones she gave, Phil didn't have the context to understand. She was with a group, survivors from Quincy, escorted by herself and a member of the Minutemen.

"Aren't you one of the Minutemen?" Phil asked, vexed.

"Shh," Cait replied, as she led Phil through the back alley, around the Museum.

The brief bout in front of the Museum was temporarily over. A couple of raiders lay dead. The balcony was empty. Phil and Cait inched as close as they dared, with dozens of raiders roaming about. Crouched behind upturned garbage, they watched and took stock.

"Oh, wonderful. The damn raiders got inside," Cait huffed in frustration. "Hopefully the barricades hold until we get in there to help."

"Was there a plan other than 'grab the first scavver Cait comes across'?" Phil asked.

"If you're done givin' me lip, I'll tell you all about it," she replied, shifting her gaze from the Museum to Phil. "There's a crashed vertibird on the roof."

"I hope the plan isn't to fly away," Phil said, "because crashed vertibirds tend to stay that way."

She'd flown with vertibirds before, gotten dropped out of them often enough into warzones. She remembered the dizzying loops they'd make when about to crash, and in all honesty, after getting shot out of the air a few times and surviving only by dint of power armor, there was no way she'd consider getting into a vertibird without a full suit anymore. She was not afraid of heights, of course. She was afraid of the inevitable crash, as any person with common sense would be.

"Hold on, was it a military vertibird?" Phil asked. "US military?"

"Who d'you know flying vertibirds lately?" Cait retorted. 

" _I_ don't know, who?"

Cait pulled an annoyed face at Phil.

"No coffee for that gab, huh?" Phil said, grinning. 

"You got a plan I should know about?" Cait asked.

"Sure," Phil said. "First step is, we shoot our way in." Into the building full of raiders. Up the stairs to the useless, crashed vertibird. Hoping perversely that whoever crashed didn't get the opportunity to also walk away with their valuable equipment.

"Finally, you're talkin' some sense!" Cait sighed, and took out her shotgun.

 

* * *

 

Second step was, find the basement.

"They wouldn't be there," Cait argued. "Raiders would'a pushed them up. You can be outnumbered or you can give up the high ground, but ya can't do both and still be kickin'."

Phil finished stripping a raider corpse for ammo, and refilled her laser musket. Good grief, laser musket; she was two hundred years and a couple of decades too old to feel the proper glee over such a concept.

She pointed to a light fixture, clogged with dust and battered by time, but its lightbulb still giving off an even, yellow light.

"Light's still on," Phil said. "Two hundred years after the fall of civilization? Yeah, this place isn't exactly on the grid anymore. It's got its own fusion core. That means we'll find it in the basement."

"Don't you think there'll be time for scavenging after we've dealt with the small matter a' people tryin' to _shoot our arses off_?" Cait asked.

"I'll pencil it in for later," Phil said. "But fusion core first."

Cait gave an exasperated cock of her shotgun in response, but followed Phil down the hole in the floor.

 

* * *

 

Step three was finding the survivors.

Phil almost ran headlong into the wrong end of a rifle in the process. Reflexively, Phil put her hands up; this one wasn't a raider. Raiders wore much dumber hats. Raiders liked leather and strange harnesses, not embroidered waistcoats and tall boots. Raiders shot first and looted later. Nothing about this woman struck Phil as being with the raiders she'd been cutting her way through.

Behind the woman's eyes, Phil could see similar thoughts percolating as she looked at Phil. No stupid hat, no penchant for wearing belts instead of a shirt, no happy trigger finger. Phil imagined she must look like a drifter, if nothing else.

"It's alright, Fahr, she's with me," Cait waved from behind Phil.

The woman giving Phil that narrow-eyed look glanced briefly at Cait, before lowering the rifle just a bit, and moving out of the way only just enough that Phil and Cait could squeeze past and come inside the room.

"Corporal Fahrenheit," she introduced herself once the door was closed. "With the Commonwealth Minutemen."

"The General's own right hand woman, at that," Cait added, in a tone that was meaningful even if Phil didn't know what the meaning might be.

"Hancock entrusted me with this bunch," Fahrenheit tilted her head towards the motley group milling around the room. "Hoping you'll help make sure they get to where they're going without any more casualties."

"I was drafted," Phil said.

Fahrenheit suddenly looked pinched around the eyes. 

"Jesus, Cait."

"You said bring someone, I brung 'em," Cait replied, perched on top of a cabinet and reloading her shotgun without looking their way.

"You're not even in the--"

"I know, I know," Cait said, cutting Fahrenheit off just a little too quickly, and making a nervous hand gesture. "Deal with that one later, we've already got scheduled activities once we're through gettin' shot at."

"We're getting coffee," Phil added.

Fahrenheit gave the two of them an absolutely scouring deadpan look, before turning towards the room.

"Sturges, how about you let our little recruit in on your plan?" she asked.

The man standing behind the terminal, wearing overalls and a face made for smiling, straightened up and sauntered over.

 

* * *

 

Step four was back to basics.

It had been too long since Phil had worn power armor. It was strange now, foreign. It was fitted to someone else's size, and it was rusty with disuse and moved just slightly wrong. It threw Phil for a bit of a loop, used as she had been with her old suit. In some ways, maybe being completely new to the experience would have served her better, because she wouldn't have known what to expect, and would not have been frustrated by the delayed response time in the armor's motions, or the way it was calibrated on settings she was not used to.

But for all that, after the first two steps, everything fell in place. The weight of the minigun was the same. The jump off the roof felt like every fall did in power armor. The impact rattled her teeth and made her adrenaline pump in recognition of a once familiar experience.

By the time the deathclaw burst out of the ground, Phil couldn't even muster surprise before she wheeled around the minigun and aimed for the underbelly.

 

* * *

 

By the time Phil clambered out of the power armor and made her way back into the Museum, Fahrenheit had already whipped the group into shape and gotten them ready for the road.

"We're going to this place the old broad saw in a chem vision," Fahrenheit explained bluntly, and before Phil could ask any snarky questions about what the place was called, Fahrenheit added, "Sanctuary Hills."

Phil was startled, and it must have shown on her face, because Fahrenheit tilted her head curiously.

"You know the place?" she asked.

"Uh... yeah, it..." Phil licked her lips.

She couldn't really add anything. After getting out of the vault, she couldn't bare to linger in the decrepit ruins of her former life. She'd hightailed it out of there fast, not even checking on her former house.

"I know where it is," Phil finally said. "You... need help on the escort?"

"Nah," Fahrenheit replied breezily. "You've done more than enough. Should probably have mentioned, you weren't really drafted."

"Oh," Phil smothered a chuckle.

"Other than the fact that Cait isn't a Minuteman," Fahrenheit punctuated this with a look at Cait, who shrugged unapologetically, "we're a _people's militia_."

"I know," Phil said. "I might've fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, but believe it or not, I did figure that I couldn't get drafted into a volunteer army."

A smile tugged at the corner of Fahrenheit's lip, and she glanced at Phil's Pip-boy.

"Vaultie, huh?" Fahrenheit said. She punched Phil's shoulder playfully. "You did good, for canned goods."

Phil actually, genuinely laughed at this.

"Right, glad we sorted this out," Cait said, clapping Phil over the shoulder, like it was all water under the bridge. "So where are we headin' next?"

"Excuse me?" Phil turned to Cait, blinking.

"Not coming along, Cait?" Fahrenheit asked, seemingly amused.

"No offense, Fahr, but growin' tatoes in the middle of nowhere isn't my speed. You lot can have a go at it in Sanctuary Hills," Cait replied. Then she gestured towards Phil. "But I can spot my kind of trouble from miles away, and this one here is it."

"You're your own woman, Cait," Fahrenheit shrugged, and settled her rifle over her shoulder. "You'll be welcome in Sanctuary Hills anyway. You too," she added to Phil, bringing two fingers to the brim of her hat in a salute.

"Thanks," Phil replied.

Fahrenheit nodded once, and turned to Marcy Long, who was impatiently asking questions about the upcoming journey.

"So where we headin'?" Cait asked. "If you'll have me along, that it."

"Olivia Station," Phil replied, almost surprised to remember. It felt like it had been a long time since she decided to head there, and ages since leaving the vault. "If you're up for it, I have an errand there."

"That place crawlin' with raiders?" Cait asked.

"I imagine so," Phil said.

This didn't seem to give Cait much pause, if at all.

"Right, then. We better get at it, shouldn't we?"


End file.
